MONSTER CITY!

Rise of the Monster City!As the sun comes up the hum of
electricity surges with to the sounds of alarm clocks, coffee
machines, computers, and engines. The street lights dim while the
stores and office buildings are illuminated. Traffic fills the
vascular lane ways with cars and pedestrians alike. Phones start
beeping, conferences buzzing, registers ringing and the city comes to
life. The energy of all the machines, wires, people and buildings
bounce off one another mixing and meddling in mesmeric routine chaos.
By midday the metropolis is thundering with cosmic activity. Suddenly
the lines between individuals and the entity become blurred, humans
merge with machines and the machines with the concrete...and the
concrete with the power lines. A new organism is born of the old... enter the City Monster!

First a conglomeration of city parts
join together to from an enormous appendage. The giant shape although
ever changing and amorphous somewhat resembles a human arm. The arm
is lifted up from the ground grasping at the skyline in order to
resurrect the creatures torso. Amidst the crowded piles a huge eye
opens, then another followed by a tar filled mouth spewing melted
concrete in every direction. The Beast stands upright the size of a
small skyscraper and lets out a roar that can be heard all cross the
lands. It is the people, the wires, the machines and the energy of
the metropolis brought together as one, it is the City Monster!

“The City Monster” is a 30” x 40”
detailed pen and ink drawing I made
this drawing while I was working as a graffiti street art performer
in Sept. 2005. I had spent the entire summer doing large live mural
painting performances in downtown Toronto and was really inspired by
all the people, events and incidents I had witnessed. Prior to this
artwork I had been making a lot of single character weird face
portraits and sequential transformation drawings. As the season came
to a close I decided to add up all the techniques I'd explored in the
more simple works to create this intricate street scene. The finished
artwork took me five days ( approximately 50 hours) and remains one
of my favourite pieces to this day. It is also interesting to note
that I left one character blank in the lower left hand side and use
this space to add a unique hand drawn face to each of the limited
edition prints.

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